The present invention relates in general to charging stations of automatic galvanizing installations, and in particular it relates to a method of and a device for feeding data about articles to be galvanized in such installations.
It is known that a galvanizing process differs widely according to the kind of articles to be treated. It is therefore necessary both in charging, and also in discharging, stations of such installations, through which the articles pass prior to their treatment in the galvanizing bath, to determine the kind of the supplied articles and accordingly what kind of treatment is required, that is, what kind of bath is necessary or how long the articles should be exposed to the bath, and the like. For instance, in the case of flat articles, the upper surface or the front side should be treated intermittently or continuously, and the same treatment should be applied to the rear side. Also, the amount of applied current, the exposure period, as well as current densities for respective baths differ from each other, and so differ the time intervals in the case of an intermittent treatment. All these data must be timely fed to the galvanizing installation before it starts processing the particular sort of articles.
In prior-art methods for feeding such information by means of punched cards, input keyboards, magnetic cards or by feeding data stored in a storing device, various shortcomings have been encountered. In particular, the disadvantage of such prior-art methods is the fact that in the event of an incorrect input by the operator or by assigning an incorrect punched card to the supplied articles, the automatic galvanizing installation has treated the articles in a correspondingly incorrect manner and damaged the latter, frequently to such an extent that the articles became unusable. Moreover, the manual feeding of information is relatively time-consuming and incompatible with automatically operating devices. Furthermore, the manual data feeding limits the amount of the applied information. In the case when punched cards are supplied simultaneously with the articles, they are exposed to the danger of being lost or made unusable.